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When you’re an athlete and doing high intensity trainings, it’s really important to manage your training schedule the most optimal way so you can give your best and perform at a top level like you want. This means that it’s super important to organize yourself and analyze how many times a week you want and can workout, during how many hours, and how much rest you want and need to give yourself in order to keep that level.

Every workout and every person are different, so the amount of work and rest, the balance between these two, is up to each one of you. You and only you know when you’re tired and need rest, and when you’re feeling energetic and want to train. As an athlete, consistency in trainings is crucial to get to the level that you want, but that doesn’t mean that if you take a day or two to rest it’ll be negatively impacting in your work.

We all work differently and have different bodies and capabilities; we all respond differently to things. My opinion is that as an athlete you should workout between 5 to 6 days a week. Of course, this can vary for specific circumstances, but I believe that this is a good balance between hard work and proper health care.

Now, the way you can distribute these 5-6 days of training during the week is something very personal. I suggest you try different options until you find the one that works best for you. In my case I’ve tried different combinations and I feel like I found the one that works best for me.

When I started my fitness journey, I trained pole for 5 days in a row and then got 2 continuous rest days. During these 5 days I generally added flex training inside my pole workout, so my sessions were about 3 hours long. After doing this for about 6 months I felt pretty energetic, so I switched to training 6 days in a row getting only 1 rest day. During these 6 days of nonstop training, I did pole for 3 days in a row, 1 day of focalized bends, then 3 days of pole and then 1 rest day. I even started doing double workouts some days, adding cardio mostly, so I was also training 3 hours a day, sometimes even 4. After about 2 and a half years training with this modality I was pretty exhausted. I felt like I needed to do some adjustments not only because I was tired but because I wanted to separate my workouts and focalize them. For the last 2 years I’ve been doing 3 days of training and then rest 1 day, 3 days of training and then rest 1 day, and so on. During these 3 days of training, I use 2 days for pole and 1 for cardio/flex/legs/glutes/etc. Every workout is between 2-3 hours long, sometimes even 4. Lately I’ve been feeling a little less motivation for training as I felt a little tired. I started getting pretty anxious before my trainings because I started to think about the things I was going to do, and it made me exhausted just to think about it. I realized this was a sign of over training. I was doing too much all the time and focusing on getting things faster rather than enjoying the journey and just letting things happen when they happen, and most importantly, I wanted to enjoy myself more before, during and after training. I decided I had to change my training schedule and give myself more rest days and avoid training for long periods of time during all week. I’ve been doing now 3 training days, 1 rest day, 2 training days and 1 rest day. Every workout is between 1,5-2,5 hours long.

I try to avoid doing 2 consecutive days of pole training because the muscles need to recover, pole is very hard on the shoulders and upper back so you shouldn’t do pole for many days in a row, you need time to recuperate. I used to do 6 days of pole training when I was competing, and probably will do it again when I compete again, but this is very extreme, it’s just for competition training, I wouldn’t recommend doing it like this for a long period of time because it’s too much for the body. I hurt a lot when I’m training for competitions and working out 6 days in a row is very hard for the body so I don’t recommend it and prefer to leave a day in between pole trainings. When I did 3 days in a row of pole training I was ok because I was used to competition training, so I didn’t feel bad, but I know it’s much better to leave a day in between just to give time to recover and be able to give my best each time I train.

This is really personal, you should try and see what works for you, how you feel. I think the most important thing is to make sure you’re eating properly and resting enough; resting is as important as training. Sometimes we get obsessed with movement and neglect resting, which is very bad, I did it for a long time and got a very bad low back injury due to overtraining so I learned the hard way to understand how to listen to the body and obey it. If you want to workout go for it, but if you feel super tired then you need to rest. It’s pretty simple but very hard to follow. Also, don’t get consumed on the fact that the more you repeat something the faster you’ll evolve, this is true but to a certain level, don’t neglect resting because that’s what’s going to get you to the level you want to be in, resting doesn’t set you back, quite the contrary. Recovery and rest are as important as the trainings themself. If you train and don’t rest, you won’t be giving your body the time it needs to refuel and relax, and you’ll be impacting directly in the efficiency of your trainings. Every time you work out, you’ll get more and more tired, your body will start showing you that it can’t work properly, and you’ll start feeling emotionally tired as well. You’ll get frustrated with yourself, with your body and with your mind. This is why it’s crucial to have rest days, where you can regain your energy and give your body time to recover and rest.

You can try all these different ways of combining trainings and rest days and you can try others that I haven’t tried yet, the thing is that you need to figure out which one works best for you so you can be in your 100%.

In conclusion I would say don’t train pole more than 4 times a week, backbends and leg flex 2-3 times a week, cardio 2-3 times a week, and don’t do the same training 2 days in a row so your muscles can recover, listen to your body and give what it asks for.

What I do now is day 1 pole, day 2 cardio (abs, legs, glutes, or any of these) + leg flex, day 3 pole, day 4 rest, day 5 backbends, day 6 pole/lyra/aerial silks, day 7 rest.

Hope this helps you with your workouts and understanding more how everything works. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments, I would love to read them.

Train safe and take care of your bodies and minds!

Eileen